Technology

Buying and selling used books for fun and not necessarily for profit

The sale of used books has undergone many changes in the last decade. It used to be a friendly and more personal endeavor when people interested in looking for books visited a used bookstore. Used book sellers expect potential customers to be bibliophiles who generate more business because they collect and invest in books. Although used bookstores still grace malls and squares, Amazon has become the great bully of used bookstores on the Internet that the reader can count on to buy any book with just a few clicks of an iPhone. Now the name of the game is to make a quick buck selling books on Amazon, not your local used bookstore. Today, selling books has become a rat race for profit.

Today, the sale of used books has gone from reading and collecting to making a lot of money. These young sellers can make huge profits by paying to download the “Amazon Seller App” on their iPhones. This gives them access to Amazon, which instantly lists what they would pay for each book by scanning a book’s barcode and voila! – You can see the book prices on Amazon. Amazon offers an incentive to sell faster. It’s called Fulfillment by Amazon (“Fulfillment by Amazon”), which pays the seller immediately after sending a box full of books to the company. But many sellers on Amazon reported on YouTube the incredible amounts of money they made, while others reported less favorable financial experiences.

Although you may want a quick shot at making easy money, you may be wearing pink glasses. As the saying goes, “If it’s too good to be true, it probably is.” Therefore, let’s slow down this process and do not rush to flip books. What is lost here is an appreciation for books, especially distinguished ones that are old and have been gathering dust for decades, even centuries. When I visit my faithful local Salvation Army, I don’t just look for modern and sometimes popular books for profit. I search the ranks for much older editions that might be valuable, because they were overlooked by the staff. Sometimes they are classics of literature, sometimes not. Or the oldest books can be part of a set of volumes. A reputable bookstore that sells rare books may also have the whole set at a weekend garage sale.

For many old-school book buyers, collecting should be fun. Most sellers still buy used books at yard sales, church and library book sales, property sales, and of course, used bookstores without the help of a barcode reader. They enjoy the challenge of searching the rows of shelves and tables for books that are attractive to the eye.

Also, finding books that might be rarer and more valuable is the result of taking the time to browse rows of books. Buying books can become part of a personal reading library that can decorate a room with just a few shelves full of books to one with shelves reaching to the ceiling. What a great personal library communicates about its owner is cultivation, even education: a Renaissance man or woman. Books can really define a man or a woman, or as the legendary ancient Roman philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero said: “A room without books is like a body without a soul.”

To join the book business, the book seller must be a book buyer, or he would not have any books to sell for profit. But the person who buys books may keep them for no financial gain. Today, many young sellers go to book sales armed with their Amazon seller devices and scan books as fast as they can to find high-profit books. But to many book seekers, this seems in bad taste. Instead, the leisurely bibliophile searches for books to find the prizes he buys to add to his collection or read in his spare time. When you are done enjoying your book, you can sell it for a profit.

It seems that Amazon’s bustling seller program with its relatively new seller app is a real source of profit for many who use their maximum financial gain. Others object because the program did not work for them. Perhaps if you want to sell used books, you can open a used bookstore, where fast money is replaced with a slower financial stream of income. For the Amazon seller, books are just objects that, when scanned for big bucks, fly off the table. For the bibliophile, books are like friends who never leave the shelf.

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